Happy New Year to you and yours! Is it too late to say that now? Anyway, we hope you had a great holiday.

Now it’s back to the grind!

Here’s the latest in the world of Deep Ventures:

• Portfolio company highlights from Panther Protocol, Bitflow Finance, and Load Network

• Predictions for 2026

• New content: Who owns the upside - token or equity holders?

Let’s go!

Portfolio Highlights

Panther Protocol

Panther Protocol is building confidential on-chain DeFi infrastructure that allows for private transactions across multiple chains.

The Panther DAO recently approved the deployment of a Panther privacy pool on the Base Network!

The Base deployment introduces a new shielded pool with strict daily limits, PureFi compliance enforcement, and Reality.eth–based governance control, ensuring the same security and regulatory posture as existing deployments on Polygon.

Panther’s multi-chain vision is coming to life!

Bitflow Finance

Bitflow Finance is the #1 decentralized exchange aggregator on Stacks.

Bitflow is a few short weeks away from launching their concentrated liquidity infrastructure. All the audits are complete and they are in the final stage of testing.

They have $40M+ in deposit commitments for critical pairs in the ecosystem - sBTC, STX, USDC, etc. - that are ready to be deployed and ramp up once they go live.

This is a huge impending launch, and we can’t wait to see the liquidity flow soon!

Load Network

Load Network is the first high performance EVM storage chain, allowing developers to store, verify, and compute with any data at any scale.

2025 was full of milestones for the network. This included a rebrand, token launch, deep improvements to their products, and much more!

Load Network achieved these impressive milestones this year:

• 1.6M data items stored

• 22M transactions processed by its Layer 1 blockchain

• The release of a DEX, cross-chain bridge between Load L1 and Ethereum, and a network-native stablecoin, USDL.

A lot got done in 2025, and more to come in 2026!

Interested in investing with us? We’ve launched Deep Ventures Fund 1 and we’d love for you to be involved. Please take a look at our deck, ping me at [email protected], and schedule a chat!

Predictions for 2026

It’s prediction time! Here are some of my off-the-cuff predictions for 2026.

Bitcoin will hit a new all-time high, and Bitcoin DeFi will make strides

Bitcoin will reach a new ATH in 2026, somewhere around $225-250K.

This will be driven by much more institutional demand - the inclusion of bitcoin ETFs in model portfolios, 401Ks, and directed mandates as opposed to just self-directed investments.

Morgan Stanley recently filed for a Bitcoin ETF, and Ric Edelman, one of the most prominent financial advisors, recommends a 10%-40% (!) crypto allocation - a bold shift from his 2021 advice of just 1%. Higher.

As such, there will be renewed interest in Bitcoin DeFi, as many HODLers will seek ways to obtain yield from their corn. Bitcoin DeFi devs have continued to build under the radar, and their time will come this year, with total value locked (TVL) increasing by 50%.

Stablecoins and DeFi will reach ATHs

Stablecoin circulation will exceed $450B, topping its ATH of ~$300B amid payment and treasury adoption. Transaction volume will top $100T, double the ~$50T that we saw in 2024.

DeFi TVL will surpass $400B, exceeding the prior ~$230B ATH. As mentioned, Bitcoin DeFi will play a role here, as will an increase in regulated inflows and tokenized assets.

Crypto x AI will make a resounding comeback

Bittensor will lead decentralized AI’s resurgence, powering subnets for machine learning, inference, and synthetic data amid renewed hype in AI agents.

We invested in Yanez, a subnet that is generating synthetic ID data for financial crime prevention.

And a video from September 2024 of me asking Jensen Huang a question about Bitcoin mining and AI resurfaced, and Jensen basically described Bittensor.

With Coinbase’s x402 standard becoming more mainstream, agentic payments will increase significantly and contribute to the rise of stablecoin transaction volume, as mentioned prior.

Up only in 2026!

New Content

Who owns the upside?

There’s been a lot of talk about the pros and cons of tokens vs. equity for blockchain protocols.

Circle, the creators of USDC, recently acquired the team and intellectual property of Interop Labs, the core contributors to the Axelar Network. And they intentionally left out the AXL token from the deal.

This acquisition is a clear reminder that crypto still has not figured out who actually owns the value of a blockchain protocol: token holders or equity owners?

I wrote about the broader, long-running battle between tokens vs equity, and foundations vs labs entities.

Read more here.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this edition of the DV monthly newsletter!

Hit me up at [email protected] or @mikewchan on Telegram with your thoughts about the newsletter, what’s happening in crypto, or anything else!

Talk soon!